Muted Orchestra <(Muted Situations #22: Muted Tchaikovsky 5th)>

Trained in composition, philosophy and gender studies, Samson Young has developed a protean body of work that encompasses music and sound creation, installation, video and performance. His work is particularly attentive to the tensions, gaps and misunderstandings that exist between the audible and the inaudible. His video series Muted Situations, begun in 2014, comprises twenty-two works to date. It follows a unique protocol: inviting the chosen performers to perform a piece of music or dance by depriving it of the intentional sounds that characterise it.

In this case, each instrument in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony has been “prepared” to muffle the sound. As the music disappears, the richly synchronised gestures of the concert are revealed, creating a different sonic landscape in which the clacking of keys, the rustling of scores and the rubbing of bows on strings that have been prevented from vibrating mingle. The work seems to echo a whole conceptual tradition of silence as music, of which John Cage's 4'33'' from 1952 is a manifesto, but while Cage invited us to contemplate the sounds of the world, Samson Young's approach is very different. He exposes the underlying systems that govern the writing and performance of music, allowing us to reflect on the hierarchical principles inherent in all representation. “Mute is not silence,” he explains. “Muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory. It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices; as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalized, or to make apparent certain assumptions about hearing and sounding.”  The spatialisation of sound through twelve floor-level loudspeakers immerses the audience in the intimacy of the orchestra. Samson Young manifests the activity of each musician equally, offering up an unsuspected world of subtle sounds in which the codes and rites of the classical concert are laid bare.

Marcella Lista